Chapter 1 #4
Wich knew what "here" was. Between the spaceship where the restaurant had once been and the big circular base that housed the USO, was a wide column covered in indigo tile that as far as he knew, housed only elevators and mechanicals.
Helen felt along the tiles, then she pushed, opening a concealed door.
“Close it behind you,” she said, stepping into the dark, "but wait here until I turn the lights on.”
He closed the door and waited, listening to her careful tread reverberating on the metal grating—Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop—until she came to the last step. A moment later, the lights flickered on.
From the top of the circular staircase, he looked over the room below, a windowless womb of deep blue acoustic tiles as round as a drum.
The floor was inlaid with elaborate curves and random swirls of green, blue and brown until they finally resolved themselves into the familiar contours of Los Angeles from the San Gabriel Mountains to the smooth curve of coastline between the Pacific Palisades and Palos Verdes.
Dividing the map were two heavy gold lines that crossed at LAX. That’s where Helen was when he reached the bottom of the stairs.
“It’s kind of like L.A., this place,” she said, “some combination of hubris and hope. When I’m here, I almost feel like I can understand my father.”
She toed the intersection of the gold lines.
“Almost.”
He bent down, touching the rough gouge that had been hacked into the flooring at exactly the place where the lines crossed.
“I did that, trying to break the curse. All I did was break a perfectly good nail file.”
Wich sat next to her with his bum knee extended. “Most people wouldn’t see eternal youth as a curse.”
“That's because they've never tried it,” she said. “Wait until they’ve had to bite their tongue while someone ten years their junior lectures them on what they should want and who they should be. Or they’ve had to hide their past from friends because who’s going to believe I was in the air on 9/11 or heard Cyndi Lauper sing Time After Time at Park West in ‘84?
“And you know what the worst thing is? Knowing I'll never have someone to share that suitcase of memories with. I didn’t like dating 21-year-olds when I was one, but the only thing worse than a 21-year-old is a creep my age who wants to hook up with NTS.”
She removed the clip from her hair and lay back, staring at the ceiling of depthless black spangled with stars. A detailed compass rose seemed to float beneath it.
Her hand splayed against her throat, her thumb picked out a slow steady rhythm against her collarbone. She turned to him.
“Can you hear it?”
He lay down next to her, his eyes closed, listening. He was about to say ‘no’ but then he felt something resonating in the drum of the room, as solid as a heartbeat, as slow as a breath.
He turned to her to tell her that, yes, he had felt the thrum of the earth’s core, except then he forgot all about mystical resonances in drum-shaped rooms. Instead, he thought only about this vulnerable, defiant woman fighting such a lonely fight.
She was right. Who could she complain to? She was rich, beautiful, forever young.
She was so many things but never herself.
Except here. In this weird, forgotten place where she had shown this very real part of her to him, to Peter Wichowski of all people.
If he was Rumpelstiltskin, she was Cinderella; only once she left the ball, she would put her glass slippers back on and return to her tedious half-life as a princess.
She pushed back a stray hair from the corner of his eye and he turned into her palm, into the smell of orange peel and metal, so sharp and strong and different from the cloying sweetness of vanilla and peony.
Then he felt something he hadn’t felt for so long.
Maybe never. The desire was as strong as his first kiss with Carolee Dieter in his closet surrounded by a fug of Love’s Baby Soft and teen sneakers.
But this time there was something else, something that was not just prising open his body, it was burrowing into his soul.
Wich wanted everything about Helen. He wanted the curve of her thighs, the softness of her lips, the surety of her voice, the way she knew the world for what it was and stood up to it.
The way she dragged him toward her, sliding beneath him, pushing his arms away, so she could have the full heaviness of him.
He started slowly, his kisses brushing silken and fluttery as a moth’s wing across her skin. He wanted to draw it out, to keep midnight from coming when the pumpkin turned into a carriage and the woman turned into a princess.
But when she snaked her hand around his head, wearing the liquid smile of someone who knows what she wants, all restraint vanished.
He twisted around, straddling her, his body one quivering, unsteady, electric nerve as he opened his lips, drinking in the whisky bitterness and bright red maraschino sweetness of her mouth.
At that moment there was a POP followed by a kinetic BZZZZZZZZT that bubbled through his blood and for the half second before he flew across the room, he realized how dangerous a desire like this could be.
“Wich!” Helen shouted, as he hit the wall and slid down to the floor. A moment later, she was next to him her hair loose on either side of her worried face. “What just happened?”
He blinked, shaking his head and stretching his jaw as he tried to relieve the pressure in his ears. “I don’t…don’t know,” he said, pulling himself upright.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes?” he said, a little tentatively. “Though my mouth tastes like burned metal and my leg….” He kicked off his shoe and scrunched up his jeans, waiting for the familiar dull ache to be replaced by the much worse sharp pain he’d felt on and off since tearing his meniscus running the Aliso Summit Trail.
“Is that a knee brace?”
“Not a knee brace. A custom-made therapy sleeve with 16 neodymium magnets and a copper-lined gel pad for optimal compression and stability, specially designed for meniscal tears.”
“In other words, a knee brace.”
“For what I spent on it, it better have more words.”
He undid the side stabilizer, noticing how weirdly hot it was as he slipped it down. The two of them stared first at the scorch mark on the sleeve, one that matched exactly the gouge made by Helen’s nail file. Then they looked at the still-smoking intersection of the gold lines on the floor.
She ran her finger over it, feeling the familiar outline, then looked at him with a sad half smile. “Of course, the one time I pretend to be myself...” She sighed and twisted her hair back up in her clip, then stood up.
“Wait, Helen.” Wich reached for his knee brace, but she was already slinging the bag with the spangled jumpsuit and Lucite mules over her shoulder.
“I’m not going to bigfoot Wistful,” she said. “It was always kind of a fantasy, the idea that I could play that part. I think I always knew it would have been a distraction and not fair to Sarah.” She took out her phone. “But maybe I could be an angel investor or a—“
“I don’t think I could deal with NTS, knowing you were trapped inside.
I can’t even imagine looking at another billboard for Fly Girl and if I ever smell that stupid perfume again…
” As he started to pull on his brace the wrong way up and ripped it off again.
“You are real. I could fall in love with you so easily. Let me figure this out. Let me figure some way to make this happen. To make this real. To—”
“Spoken like a man who can be counted on to throw razors into a tornado,” she said, laying her fingers—orange peel and metal—to his lips.
“No one else has ever known the real me and it seems unlikely anyone else ever will. For what it’s worth, if there was going to be only one, I’m glad it was you, Peter Wichowski. ”
A moment later, the lights went out.
“Helen?” Peter tried to stand, clinging to the wall so he wouldn’t topple over.
The metal stairs rattled—flip,flop,flip,flop—and a light flashed as the curved door in the column opened briefly, then closed.
“HELEN.”
Maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was desperation, but whatever it was, his knee felt stronger than it had since Aliso . Without thinking, he raced from terminal to terminal, zigzagging between shops, bathrooms, and unmarked doors yelling for Helen.
He didn't stop until at Tom Bradley, he collapsed in front of the huge animated pink billboard of NTS blowing petals from her palm.
There had to be a solution. After all, wasn’t this what he did? He took preposterous scripts with impossible situations and paced back and forth on his tiny balcony until he found a narrative that could convince audiences that the impossible was possible.
This was exactly the same, only now he had to concoct a narrative that would convince an audience of one that their impossible was possible.
But it wasn't exactly the same and he knew it.
“Can I help you?” asked a woman with a severe uniform and a kind face.
Wich looked up bleakly. Bring her back, he wanted to say but instead only managed to croak out, “I think I may have missed my connection.”
“What’s your flight number?”
Flight number, he repeated dully and fumbled for his phone. When he finally managed to turn it back on, it erupted into a cacophony of chirps and buzzings.
“Sounds like somebody’s been trying to get in touch with you,” the woman said with a chuckle. “Maybe they found your shoe.” He looked down at his sock, dully realizing he'd left his shoe behind.
Before he could respond, his phone rang with Irma Thomas singing T-i-i-i-ime is on my side (Yes, it is).
“What the hell did you do to Nell Temple-Stewart?” Megan snapped, without waiting for him to say anything.
“Nothing,” he said, trying to focus. “Wait, what happened to her?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. She apparently called Kyle frantic for your number. She won’t tell Kyle why, so Kyle calls me because you, god help me, are my responsibility.”
“MeganMeganMegan, listen to me. I need her number.”
Megan’s treadmill was already going fast but then she upped the speed, a sure indication that she was pissed off.
“Let me see if I’ve got this right: you sneak out through the Seraphic kitchens because you don’t want to have a coffee with Nell Temple-Stewart and now you’re asking for the most closely guarded number in—”
“Give her mine. Give it to Kyle, to his second assistant’s cousin. Blast it on a billboard for all I care. I’m beg—”
"Oh just stop it. You forget who you’re talking to. I know who you are. Somehow this is going to end up with you making a scene and—“
“I’m making a scene right now,” he said, putting her on speaker and throwing his arms wide. “Here, in the middle of Tom Bradley International,” he shouted, “I, Peter Wichowski, am begging you, Megan Kara of Pinnacle Representation Group, to give Nell Temple-Stewart my phone number.”
He held up his cell so that Megan couldn’t miss the cheers and the dozens of shouted phone numbers, proof that he could still make a scene if he needed to.
“I am this close to dropping you,” Megan hissed and Wich knew without seeing that her thumb and finger were squashed together.
“Megan, I know how hard this is to believe but I would never hurt her. Please. All I’m asking is for you to give her my number and let her decide for herself.”
There was the slowing beep, beep, beep of her treadmill decelerating as she called for her second assistant to call Kyle’s second assistant. “Give him the asshole’s number.”
A plaintive voice asked “which asshole?” before the line went dead.
The crowd that had gathered around taking videos when he’d started pleading had begun to disperse, unwilling to lose their place at the gate just to catch the punch line to his despair.
This time when his phone rang—T-i-i-i-ime is on my side (Yes, it is)—it was from an anonymous number, and his hand shook so hard that he overshot the little green button. “Helen, please call me again,” he murmured. “Please. Please.”
“I’m right here, Wich.”
And she was.
She was right there, standing in front of him, close enough for him to wrap his arms around her hips, close enough to bury his face in her belly. “How…?”
“I’d already come back to look for you,” she whispered, stroking his hair. “Then my publicist sent a video someone had posted. She thought it was funny. This guy screaming my name in front of the Tom Bradley Jamba Juice.”
But Wich had her in his arms and was well beyond caring about such petty things as dignity or reputation.
“Helen,” he said, getting to his feet without letting go of her, “I know this seems crazy, but give me a little time. I will figure something out. We could live at the Hyatt Regency or if that’s too far, we could sleep in the Pods in Terminal Five.
I have membership to three lounges with showers and food. Then we just need to—”
“I didn’t change, Wich.”
“Change?” he asked, looking at her T-shirt, joggers and flip-flops. His mind, having tried to hit reverse in mid-sentence, was spinning out.
“Not my clothes,” she said. “Me. I was on the 405 when I saw…” She lifted a hand corded with veins beneath translucent skin.
Then he looked over her shoulder at NTS and the peony petals lofting from a perfectly smooth and featureless palm.
“Then I finally got up the courage to look into the rearview mirror.”
Taking her hand, he held it to his lips, nuzzling it against his cheek until he saw the tears forming. Wich gathered her tight to his chest, trying to protect her from the prying eyes of strangers.
He couldn’t just stand here, grinning like an idiot. He had to say something, something that acknowledged the loss of NTS, of her forever youth, her peony-and-vanilla brand.
“Helen. I’m so sorry. I—“
“Sorry? Who said anything about being sorry?” When she pulled back, her face was tear-stained but radiantly happy. “I don’t know how it happened and it’s going to be a mess to explain but for the first time in decades, when I look at myself, all I see is… me.”
When the loudspeaker announced a last call for Peter Wichowski to proceed to Gate 156, he ignored it, leaving the Desert Lords high and dry.